IS SENSORY EXPERIENCE DETERMINED BY CULTURAL HISTORY? HUSSERL, SENSORY STUDIES AND PSYCHOLOGY

Abstract

In this paper, Husserl’s phenomenology is confronted with the idea that our collective history and the culture we inherit and grow in (including language, habits, cultural values), influence our experience of the world. Drawing from “sensory studies” (namely, sensory history and anthropology), a first version of this idea is formulated, where history and culture are thought to affect the quality, intensity, spatiality, and other attributes of the sensory contents that underlie our perception. This first version is confronted with Husserl’s conception of hyletic data in the 1910s and 1920s, which, in contrast, assumes that our sensory experience is immune to such an influence. In a second section, evidence from contemporary experimental psychology is put forward to support Husserl’s position. Our early, basic, sensory processes, appear to be safe from any historical, cultural determination, and as such, to be universal. In a third and last section, the question of the influence of history and culture on our perceptual experience is reframed according to that evidence, in the context of genetic phenomenology. Some conceptual tools from genetic phenomenology are subsequently introduced to account for the historicity of our sensory experience in that new framework.